Tag Archives: design

Patterned by Nature is an installation in North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. It feature600 LCD screens that form a ribbon through the building’s atrium and display various natural patterns. Since the project wanted to utilize the natural light in the space the LCD screens aren’t back lit and use a very low power Liquid Crystal Display pixel to render the images. The most interesting thing is that the entire thing runs off just 75 watts of power.

This is an interesting project I stumbled across. It’s called forms and is by visual artists Memo Akten and Quayola and generates 3D forms based on the movement of Olympic athletes. It doesn’t state explicitly, but I’m betting their using some form of motion tracking and using a code to generate the shapes along the athletes’ trajectories.

I found this really intriguing, because of the visual quality and because of how the distorted the original objects, the athletes, become using more linear and particle based elements. I’ve watch versions of this that show footage of the actual athletes in action and ones that don’t, and without the raw video as a point of reference I personally found it difficult to piece together what each form is.

If you check out Quayola’s website you can see the video without the raw footage, as well as a video that starts to break down the process.

Game and interactivity designers + scholars, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman have written a fantastic book called Rules of Play. I highly recommend the book to anybody interested in the topic. While their objective is to interrogate the world of play and games, much of the prose is appropriate for design in general.

As both a catalyst for blog posting and a foundation for thinking about all of your work in this class, please read the following sections.

Unit 1: Section 3, Meaningful Play, pg 31-37

Unit1: Section 4, Design, pg 39-47

Unit1: Section 5, Systems, 49-55

Unit1: Section 6, Interactivity, 57-69

IIT students can access the entire book through, books 24×7 online … Here

Explore the museum late at night with After Dark in the Modern Wing. Check out cutting-edge art in the contemporary galleries; then rock out to Bridget Marie, DJ A-Cup, Le Sprite, and DJ Mother Hubbard and performances by acclaimed theatrical ensemble Collaboraction. Complimentary appetizers with cash bar. After Dark—see the Art Institute in a new light.

Nice thing to do on the 13th of may now that we have a lot of free time to enjoy.